James Green often threatened to kill Kathy Tatum-Toyne “just like the others.”

“He told me he had killed people before and that I was next and that I probably would first watch my family die,” said Tatum-Toyne, who married Green in Sterling in 1986. “I think he told me things to play on my fear. It worked.”

Newly found evidence suggests Green’s threats may not have been just bluster. He has recently emerged as the chief suspect in the murders of Lakewood housewife Dolores House, who disappeared when her car overheated in 1972, and Littleton resident Richard Seykora, who was killed in a freak accident on an elk hunting trip in 1969.

Lakewood Detective Bryan Feik and Gilpin County Sheriff’s investigator Bob Enne are investigating the cases together with new evidence, including House’s skull, which had been stored in a box as a Jane Doe until 2010 on a Colorado Bureau of Investigation storage shelf. The skull — probably pierced with a bullet fired by a high-caliber rifle — had been discovered by mushroom hunters in 1977 in Gilpin County.

Clues in the House case led to a startling revelation in the Seykora shooting.

Green had been one of several suspects in House’s disappearance from a Lakewood shopping center since Aug. 16, 1972, when witnesses saw her climb into a two-toned Ford Bronco that looked like Green’s.

He has been arrested three times for rape, once for child molestation and once for attempted rape between 1955 and 1997 in Texas and Colorado. He worked as a butcher at a grocery store on Colfax Avenue a few miles from where House was abducted and he matched descriptions of the man driving the Bronco.

“There is a lot of circumstantial evidence linked to him,” Enne said.

After House’s skull was identified, Feik and Enne checked to see if the information pointed to any particular suspect.

Feik soon learned Green had been living in rural Gilpin County at the time House was abducted. Three years earlier, he had shot Seykora in the hunting accident, also in Gilpin County. Eleven days after House disappeared, Green was arrested on a separate rape charge in Gilpin County. The disposition in the case is not known, Feik said.

Green soon became the primary suspect in the House murder, although no physical evidence, such as fingerprints or DNA, tied him to the case. And trouble was, Green had died several years earlier of cancer.

Feik said it was still important to solve the cases to provide closure to family members. Over the years, there had been speculation that House had abandoned her three kids and run away with another man or to Hollywood.

“These kids grew up just not knowing what happened to their mother,” Feik said.

Feik interviewed many of Green’s family members and ex-wives. He had married about 10 women, often following the same pattern.

He was 20 years older than Tatum-Toyne when they met in a Sterling restaurant. He was charming, handsome and sensitive, she said. They married within a month. A week later, she realized she had made the mistake of her life. Green turned into a monster, she said. He would push her head into a pillow face first and rape her. He beat her and never let her out of his sight.

Green told Tatum-Toyne that he killed Seykora because the man had sex with his girlfriend. He joked that he ran down from the mountain yelling that he accidentally shot his friend.

Green earned most of his money through bogus car- and house-insurance claims. He systematically set fires and staged accidents, Feik said.

When Feik flew to Texas in December and mentioned the possibility that Green may have committed murder in Colorado many years ago, relatives mentioned Seykora’s name, not House.

On Nov. 3, 1969, Green, then 33, and Seykora went on an elk hunting trip to the Roosevelt National Forest. They were dressed in elk-skin jackets, according to a Denver Post article. Green’s relatives told Feik it was a set up life-insurance scam with a $20,000 payoff.

Green also had boasted of murdering other men in Texas in the 1950s and 1960s. He was an avid hunter with many rifles and handguns.

He was very familiar with the area where House’s skull had been found. The area is remote, accessible only by a series of dirt roads.

“If you don’t know the area, you are not going to go there to dump a body,” Feik said. Killers who dump bodies tend to go on familiar country roads and dump them beside roads, not deep in a forest on a mountain slope, he said.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.